


Hellfire & Holy Water

by athenaiskarthagonensis



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Idiots in Love, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-11 23:46:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19120183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athenaiskarthagonensis/pseuds/athenaiskarthagonensis
Summary: After the apocalypse didn't happen, Aziraphale and Crowley make their way through Florence and share a soft moment together in front of Santa Croce.





	Hellfire & Holy Water

**Author's Note:**

> Like everyone else in this exploding fandom, I'm slightly obsessed with the moment during the Blitz when Aziraphale realized Crowley had saved his books. So here's a scenelet which arrived nearly fully formed in my head when I was thinking about these two ridiculous idiots and how very long they've been in love. What sorts of things would they say to each other once they've finally admitted it?

“It should be _just_ around here, _somewhere_.” It was a fretful sort of voice, fruity and mellifluous but somehow contriving to indicate through harmonics alone that its owner was a being of punctilious and exacting habits and quite strongly-held, perhaps even censorious, opinions when it came to matters of propriety, interpersonal conduct, and classical music. 

“Are you sure it’s still there?” asked a second voice. This one held an exciting sort of burr, a slow drawl which put one in mind of very fast cars and very black leather; there was just a hint of a hiss to the sibilants which might have been the remnants of an accent... but if so, the language which was this voice’s first was not one which the average listener would be able to pinpoint.[1]

“It had _best_ be,” responded the first voice rather sharply. “This stall, you’ll love it, they have the _best_ lampredotto in all of Florence.”

“I mean, it’s _tripe_ , innit?” said the second voice, as the two emerged from one of Florence’s innumerable shadowyalleys and onto a slightly larger and brighter street, pausing there and blinking at one another. “Really Aziraphale, how different could it actually be from the tripe at the other half dozen places we’ve already passed?”

The owner of the first voice, Aziraphale, proved to be a mild fellow of the sort often called comfortably plump, with pale hair which somehow put one in mind of feathers and a penchant for lighter-colored clothing... with enough warm tones added in to keep him from looking as though he ought to be hawking greasy fried chicken; his jacket and trousers were of creamy and meticulously ironed linen, yes, but he wore them with a smart waistcoat of pale gold cashmere and shoes of tobacco-hued leather. He glanced at his companion and sniffed. “Spoken like someone who’s never _had_ it.”

“I have!” protested the other man. This one was a bit taller, more than a bit leaner. His suit was as sleek as he was, all in dark colors and quite exquisitely cut to his hips and shoulders, the tailoring only emphasizing his narrowness. His artfully tousled hair was a foxy red which was well-matched to the equally foxy angularity of his features;[2] behind dark glasses, his eyes might have been any color. He wore snakeskin cowboy boots; or at least, presumably he was wearing boots. He made a put-out sort of sound. “I used to spend quite a lot of time in Florence, you know. Leonardo was a personal friend.”

“But you haven’t been here _recently?”_ asked Aziraphale with that mild note of pleased triumph most commonly employed when one has proven a friend or loved one wrong in some minor and ultimately entirely unimportant way. Blinking, he cast about himself, quite obviously comparing the current state of the city to some internal map or other. The idea of asking for directions was, of course, out of the question. It was the principle of the thing; one couldn’t just go _asking_ where to find the best-kept culinary secret in the region. One had to just _know_. “Ah-ha!” he exclaimed finally. “Ah, yes. It should be this way, come along then, Crowley.”

“Whatever you say, angel,” said the man called Crowley, who wasn’t a man any more so than was Aziraphale.

  
  


Two more turnings and the narrow streets, overhung by their tightly packed red-roofed buildings, opened up in the sudden way of those cities which still retain their medieval souls. Both paused as one at the verge of the wide rectangular piazza suddenly revealed. It was thronged with tourists -- this was not _A Room with a View_ and they no longer clutched red Baedakers, but were using their mobiles instead, and with just as little actual individual thought or genuine consideration put into any of the opinions found therein -- and bordered on the long sides with little _ristoranti_ , leather goods shops, and the sort of anonymous and interchangeable souvenir shops which collect in drifts around tourist attractions like blown litter. But neither of them had eyes for anything but the tourist attraction itself, a cathedral done up in that so very characteristic dark-and-light banded Tuscan style. 

“Santa Croce,” breathed out Aziraphale with a certain proprietary satisfaction. It was a church, after all; dedicated to and built in honor of _his_ side.

Crowley curled his lip. “Enh, I’ve seen better.” He paused, looking it up and down with finely nuanced disdain. “I’ve certainly seen _bigger_.”

“It isn’t the _size_ that matters,” Aziraphale answered primly, beginning to lead the way across the piazza, ducking between tour groups adroitly. Beside him, Crowley sauntered along like he had no idea what hips were actually for, never had known, and wasn’t about to start learning now. “Santa Croce contains some very important frescoes, you know,” Aziraphale added, sounding rather like a tour guide himself. “Giotto, Cimabue… there is his _crocifisso_ , among other irreplaceable treasures." 

Crowley winced at the word, but it was more out of habit than anything. He wasn’t quite so evil these days as he’d once been, and even then he’d really just hung around the wrong crowd. He wasn’t bad, as the saying went, to the _bone_. A glance sidelong at the angel beside him, and he reflected, not for the first time, on the ways in which the two of them had rather grown toward each other, approaching a sort of mid-point from opposite sides of the scale. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched to say they’d both become a bit more _human_. 

“Were you here for the flood?” he asked, curious.

“Which one?” Aziraphale glanced at him, blinking owlishly.

“Right. There’ve been oodles of them, haven’t there? 1966, the one when the… croci… cruci-- _ugh_ . The... thingie, Cimabue’s _thingie_ , was damaged so badly,” Crowley expanded, knowing that Aziraphale was perhaps one of the few people to whom he could say ‘Cimabue’s thingie’ and _not_ have it be taken as a penis reference. He cast a sly glance at Aziraphale through the smoky glass of his shades. “What did they call the volunteers who came to help salvage all the art? _Mud Angels_ , was it?” he teased.

“Oh, I might have pitched just in a bit,” Aziraphale answered with a coy little smile dancing around his eyes. “The state of the manuscripts was frankly _appalling_ , believe me.” A beat, and he cast his eyes sidelong at Crowley. “I got a commendation for that, actually. I was credited for inspiring the outpouring of support to rescue important religious artifacts and the coming together of a community in the wake of a terrible disaster.” The words had something of a rote air, lacking only air quotes to be marked out as a direct parroting of something another had said.

“Funny,” Crowley said. “I got credit for the flood itself, but I always figured that it was your side’s doing. All those doomsday sorts have always blamed the Arno flooding on divine retribution for Florence’s wicked ways, y’know. Holy water, sweeping away the sinners, all that rot.”

“Well. It wasn’t _me_ ,” Aziraphale said, sounding more than a bit scandalized at the very idea of doing something so very destructive of art and culture, let alone the loss of life. Though it wasn’t as though it’d be the _first_ time the Divine had used a flood, would it? He looked at Crowley, who was looking back. The two shared a moment and then said, in nearly perfect unison, “Ineffable…." 

“It really is a shame,” Aziraphale said a second later, looking again at the cathedral’s facade. “That you can’t go in, I mean. The frescoes are quite something.”

“Oh, I can go _in_ ,” Crowley said, waving one hand in a lanky sort of gesture of dismissal. “It’d hurt like blazing hellfire, but I could do.”

“Yes. I do recall,” Aziraphale said softly. Crowley glanced at him and his step hitched and checked, pinned by the sudden intensity in the angel’s normally gentle eyes. He stopped walking, the great statue of Dante in front of the cathedral casting a shadow over them both.

“Oh, _that_ ,” Crowley drawled. He waved his hand again. “Couldn’t let you get yourself Indiana Jones’d, now could I?”

“I have no idea what you’re on about sometimes,” Aziraphale answered tetchily.[3] There was a pause, lengthening like Dante’s shadow as afternoon fell. “That’s when I knew, you know. When you saved my books, I knew.”

“Knew what?” Crowley asked. He snickered. “That I was charming… one might even say _tempting_ , really? The anthropomorphic personification of evil you’d always dreamt of?” His smile, crooked and slanting, softened a bit. “That you loved me, hey?”

“No,” Aziraphale answered. The angel’s expression was as soft and melting as Crowley had ever seen it and he blinked rapidly behind his smoky glasses. “That’s when I knew for certain that _you_ loved _me_.” 

“Oh.” A bit staggered, it took Crowley a moment to respond. His face offered something which really did try its best to be a sly smirk, but landed a bit short and sauntered toward a gentle smile instead, contriving rather sheepishly to indicate it’d meant to do that all along. The expression did still feel rather odd, but it’d been there more and more often these days, ever since they’d handled that whole _Armageddon_ business together and then decided to Hell with it, they’d just _be_ together, and stop pretending otherwise. “Always have done, really.”

“I know,” Aziraphale answered, still giving Crowley that melting look which made him feel strange in what would be his heart if he was actually a human being. “So have I. We weren’t, well, _meant_ to, so I just. Told myself I didn’t. Couldn’t.”

“Lying’s a sin, isn’t it, angel? Even if it’s just to yourself?”

“Oh, would you hush! I’m trying to have a _moment_ , here.” Aziraphale blinked at him, a soft celestial gaze. “ _Anyway_ , I thought for a bit that yes, that’s when I knew I loved you. But that was only because I’d been telling myself for so long that I didn’t.”

“I never did try to pretend otherwise,” Crowley said after a moment. “Not even to myself. Not really. Which isn’t to say I wasn’t bloody _annoyed_ by it. I mean, honestly, an angel and a demon? What sort of thing is _that_ meant to be?” He gave the sort of complicated shrug which could only be properly accomplished by a being which hadn’t actually been built with shoulders in the original plan and only had them now because they came with the shape. “But mostly I was just waiting on you to catch me up.” 

Aziraphale would have blushed, if he’d been quite as human as he appeared. Regardless, he did cast his eyes coyly to the side with a demure but pleased smile, an expression he had noted, through extensive experimentation, could do some very effective and gratifying things to his companion. “Ah. Well. Hm,” he said, with that endearingly daffy awkwardness of his, “do let’s get a wiggle-on, shall we? That lampredotto isn’t going to eat itself!”

Crowley stood where he was a moment longer, watching as Aziraphale nipped smartly off ahead. And then he slouched into his normal snaky lope, casting an ironic sort of salute up at Dante as he passed. “Is he one of yours, or mine?” he asked. “I can’t recall.”

“Ah… hm. Do you know, neither can I?” Aziraphale answered.

“Well, he certainly wasn’t very accurate about _Hell_ ,” Crowley said with a laugh.

“Nor Paradise, for that matter.”

And so bantering, together as they had always really been, the angel and the demon wandered off through the streets of a city which, though ancient, was younger far than they. Eternity enwrapped them, a sense of passions requited and love at long last fulfilled. Somewhere not far away they could hear the river, bearing on down toward the sea.

 

 

* * *

 

1This was because the language in question had not been spoken by humans for nearly 6000 years, and even then, had never actually been intended to be spoken by beings with speech apparatus designed along the human plan.

2Despite appearances, there was indeed one animal which he most closely resembled. It was not a fox.

3Aziraphale’s grasp of what might be called popular culture had stalled out several centuries earlier. If he was ever to be shown the Indiana Jones movies, it was almost a certainty that he would spend the entire time critiquing the titular character’s archaeological technique, or, more accurately, his lack thereof. For this reason, quite prudently, Crowley had never even considered suggesting a movie night.


End file.
